Link: http://www.etc-architect.com/?p=107
From ETC-Architect » IT Architect Global | Data Architect, Global | Solution Architect, Global
Customer Relationship Management systems have been a hot item ever since Peter Siebel started his company in the mid 90s. With the mobile internet they got an additional boost as they enabled the data gathering of orders and relationships on the go. Or at least that was the idea. The reality did show that a vision is often not enough, as in most companies CRM systems are only used by very few staff and then often for things not intended. The main problem here is about failing architecture at so many levels.
The first is certainly on the business and enterprise architecture that were often blind to the reality in just matching capabilities with business visions without once really asking any questions or looking at the feasibility on realistic data entry. A good example is if a sales rep is in front of a customer it represents about 5 % of his time with the rest of the time spent in getting in front of that customer. So that rep will want to spent that precious time in engaging the customer and work his sales techniques, not waste it on data entry starring at a screen. All the sales training is always geared towards having the sales rep
maximum interpersonal time with the client. So making few notes on paper is the maximum of information gathering. Additional sales reps usually only have a few hours where they can actually see their clients with a lot travel time in between, as well as that sales reps are good in talking, less good in administration. So forcing the sales rep to enter many screens on data on a customer (so to have a lot of reporting data later just leads to the sales rep either selecting his work and likely not being a sales rep for long or to a data entry at the end of the day with made up information.
Even when avoiding all those pitfalls with intelligent voice and location services with backfire staff doing the actual data entry, solution and application architecture is the next point of failure, as most architects in that area have stopped to think and are just trying to implement a CRM system in the same way thy would implement an order taking on accountancy package. The key word for an application architect in CRM should be that of relations. Now many will wrongly argue that this sounds best to be implement on a relational scheme, since a relational scheme is great once you understand the relationships, not when the key is to discover relationships often with hidden relationship angles. Usually this kind of relationship discovery is best done by deploying the graph theory and as many data scientist will tell there is a lot of software to be used in this area.
So CRM is usually a good idea, but often a classical case where architects are not doing their job.
